Malpolon monspessulanus
Malpolon monspessulanus, commonly known as the Montpellier snake, is a species of mildly venomous rear-fanged snake.

Diego Delso · CC BY-SA 4.0 · via Wikipedia/Commons. May be a photograph of a specimen, or an artist’s reconstruction — an interpretation of a skeleton, since colour and soft tissue are almost never preserved.
On record
Recorded, not inferred- Also called
- Montpellier snakePBDB
- Sits inside
- MalpolonPBDB
- Diet
- carnivorePBDB, for Colubridae
- Life habit
- ground dwellingPBDB, for Colubridae
- Motility
- actively mobilePBDB, for Osteichthyes
- Environment
- terrestrialPBDB, for Amniota
Time the record covers
At least 2.4 million years on record.
The record covers at least 2.58 Mya to 129 ka. No occurrence read is dated outside 5.333 Mya to 11.7 ka.
11 occurrences of Malpolon monspessulanus on record, most of them in the Pleistocene. The Paleobiology Database records this as a living group. Bar height is expected occurrences, not a count: each fossil is spread across the span it is dated to, so a tall narrow bar means tight dating and a low wide one means loose.
When
11 occurrences- Pliocene30%
- Pleistocene70%
These are dates about fossils, not the animal: the record can only begin after it arose and end before it died out, so either end may reach further. Shares are expected occurrences: a fossil dated to a span is counted partly in each period it straddles. More on what this infers.
Malpolon monspessulanus and its relatives
PleistoceneWhere Malpolon monspessulanus and its relatives were recorded in the Pleistocene.
Found in the same rock
146 taxa- Bufo bufo7 sites
- Vipera6 sites
- Blanus cinereus5 sites
- Lacertidae5 sites
- Colubrinae4 sites
- Coronella girondica4 sites
- Lacerta4 sites
- Natrix natrix3 sites
- Rana3 sites
- Rhinechis scalaris3 sites
- Serpentes3 sites
- Tarentola3 sites
- Agamidae2 sites
- Apodemus mystacinus2 sites
- Bufo2 sites
- Bufo calamita2 sites
- Castillomys crusafonti2 sites
- Coluber2 sites
- Coronella austriaca2 sites
- Elaphe2 sites
- Eliomys quercinus2 sites
- Gekkonidae2 sites
- Lacerta lepida2 sites
- Mimomys2 sites
The Paleobiology Database records 10 sites for Malpolon monspessulanus, and this reads all of them. The number is how many of those sites it was catalogued from too. The 24 sharing the most are listed.
This is not a list of everything alive at the time. It is only what has come out of the same ground as this animal and been written down.
Entered from
6 references- Pleistocene Amphibians and Reptiles in Britain and Europe5
- Catalogue of Spanish Plio-Pleistocene amphibians and squamate reptiles from the Museu de Geologia de Barcelona2
- Small vertebrates from the Late Pliocene Las Higueruelas locality of central Spain with new biochronological and palaeoecological inferences1
- New Neanderthal remains from Mani peninsula, Southern Greece: The Kalamakia Middle Paleolithic cave site1
- Early Oligocene to Pliocene Colubridae of Europe: a review1
- Anurans and squamate reptiles from the latest early Pleistocene of Almenara-Casablanca-3 (Castellón, East of Spain. Systematic, climatic and environmental considerations1
Each of the 11 occurrences read was entered from one of these publications, ordered by how many each accounts for. This is not a search for papers mentioning the name. Entries link to doi.org where the Paleobiology Database holds an identifier, and to its own record where it does not. Relayed as the Paleobiology Database holds them, not checked against what they resolve to.
Media and terms
Media content1
Picture of Malpolon monspessulanus
- Source
- Wikipedia/Commons
- Credit
- Diego Delso
- Licence
- CC BY-SA 4.0
- Commercial use
- the licence allows it
No 3D scan of Malpolon monspessulanus was found in Sketchfab.
Smithsonian Open Access and MorphoSource were not reached for this taxon, so this list is what the others held rather than everything there is.
The description on this site
- Licence
- CC BY-SA 4.0
This is what the site found, which is not the same as what exists.
Keep going
What may have been alongside itMalpolon through timeFormations of the PleistoceneThe world it lived on
Occurrence data from the Paleobiology Database, CC BY 4.0. (Hermann 1804)